When it comes to marketing, one-size-fits-all will rarely bring you satisfying results, especially in the B2B world. If you try to create a marketing strategy that appeals to everyone, chances are that your message will get too diluted and you’ll fail to truly reach anyone.
Instead, you should aim for creating a highly personalized strategy that will target a less broad audience, but allow you to convert those you reach much faster and easier.
However, getting to know your audience and tailoring your marketing approach to their specific needs might seem like a daunting task. Here are some steps you can take to avoid these struggles and make your B2B marketing strategy more personal.
Know and segment your audience
Now, if you think that marketing personalization means altering your strategy for every single member of your audience, don’t worry – it doesn’t. So, what does it mean?
In order to make your marketing approach more personal, first, you need to identify your ideal customer and create a buyer persona. More often than not, this will not only be one but multiple different personas, which means that you should segment your audience into separate groups according to different criteria.
In fact, audience segmentation and knowing the audience better are some of the top priorities B2B marketers are aiming for in 2020.
Source: MarketingCharts
You can form these categories based on some of the most relevant attributes such as industry, location, business size, etc. These pieces of information are fairly easy to get and you probably already collect some of them, so you should have no trouble segmenting your audience according to them.
Another way to segment your audience is by dividing them according to the stage of the buying process they’re in. The further down the sales funnel they are, the more personal your content should be. Take a look at this chart to get some ideas for your personalized marketing campaign for different stages of your sales process:
Source: KlientBoost
Personalize your emails for better results
Even though digital communication has much evolved over the past decade and we’ve witnessed the rise of many different communication channels, email is still prefered way of communication for most businesses, especially B2B. In fact, a recent study has shown that 78% of B2B marketers use email to communicate with customers, while even 80% of them count on email for generating revenue.
Source: MarketingCharts
However, blind email blasts with no segmentation whatsoever won’t do the work.
So, if you want your email campaign to be a success, you have to segment your contact list into smaller groups and adapt your email copy to fit their specific needs. You can easily automate this process with B2B sales tools which will allow you to segment and filter your contact list, and create customized email templates that drive conversions.
Use social media to humanize your brand
Although email communication is the most effective B2B channel of communication, it doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore all of the others.
In fact, every channel has its own advantages. While email is the best tool in your sales team’s arsenal, social media is a great place for raising brand awareness and increasing engagement with your audience.
Besides, making your marketing more personal isn’t just about customizing your strategy to fit the different needs of different audience groups, it’s also about making your brand more human and relatable. And that’s where social media shines – it can help you humanize your brand and make it more personal.
For example, you can use it to show some behind the scenes footage of your production process which will not only humanize your brand and make it seem more approachable, but also show some more technical details about your product that your B2B audience is surely much interested in.
Use ad retargeting to lure them back
Once you’ve managed to attract visitors to your website, your job is not yet done – they actually need to take action in order for your efforts to count. One way to do it is to build a landing page so that you can convert them into leads. However, if you failed to do so, all is not lost – you can still use personalized retargeting ads and get a second chance for conversion.
Luckily, if you’ve already set up your target audience and segmented them into different groups, there are many useful tools that can help you retarget them once they leave your website and convince them to come back with the highly customized search engine or social media retargeting ads.
Just remember, the better you segment your audience, the more effective your ad targeting campaign will be. Knowing your audience and using that information to personalize your strategy is key to improving your marketing ROI.
Follow these tips to create a highly personalized B2B marketing strategy that will generate leads, increase conversions and help you improve the overall relationship whit your customers.
About the Author: Milana Jovic is a digital marketer and search engine optimizer. After getting a degree in marketing and economics, she focused on applying the knowledge to B2B and SaaS industry. Interested in combining traditional marketing strategies with new technology-driven tactics.